The Sharing Knife Book Four: Horizon

by Lois McMaster Bujold

  With his thoughts chasing their tails like crazed cats, all hope of dozing off again faded. As silently as possible, Dag levered himself to his feet with his stick, gathered up the water bottle, and began hobbling down the hillside. This was going to take a while.

  When Dag at length returned, Owlet was awake, cranky, and fearful.

  Pakko was eyeing the farmer child with a glazed sort of alarm.

  Even in his dreadful pain, the patroller was holding a tolerable ground veiling, which won both Dag’s gratitude and respect; Owlet, of course, blazed like a beacon.

  “Oh, good, you’re back,” said Pakko. A tension in his tone reminded Dag of just how long Pakko had lain up here alone, lost and hopeless.

  Dag settled himself by the man’s side, leg out. “Ayup. Water? ”

  “It’ll just make me piss myself again.” Pakko grimaced, looked away, hiding helpless shame.

  “I’m a medicine maker. I’ll deal with it.” Dag revised this slightly.

  “You help guide the bag, I’ll hold your head up.” He slipped his hand behind Pakko’s head; Pakko raised an arm, though it made him gasp.

  Together, they managed to get another good drink down the injured man. Absent gods, what a pair. We’re not half a patroller between us.

  Owlet circled around Pakko and crept into Dag’s lap; Dag gave him a drink, too, with rather more spillage, but the threat of howls passed off with only a few sniffles.

  In the daylight, Pakko squinted at Dag in new curiosity, Dag hoped not too tinged with dismay. “Except for the hand, I’d have taken you for a patroller.”

  “I was, once.”

  “Is that why you went for maker, instead? How was it you were traveling with farmers? ” He looked over at the scabbed and grubby Owlet as if the child were the most unlikely part of all this.

  “It’s a long story. A couple of long stories.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Pakko’s air of indifference was a bit too carefully held. Some tale-telling would keep his rescuer safely planted under his eye, right.

  Dag sighed. “Yeah, me neither.” But before he could choose a beginning, a ragged motion through the trees snagged his eye. He sat up, squinting, then grabbed his stick and clambered abruptly to his feet;

  Owlet, dumped, whimpered in protest. “ ’Scuse me.”

  He ducked out from under the overhang, and dared to flick open his groundsense. Mud-bat! He snapped closed again. Limped a few dozen paces along the hillside to where a rock slide had plowed open a wider view of the sky, and of the treetops falling away.

  Several hundred paces below, a laboring mud-bat crashed into the branches, fought loose, and struggled for altitude again. It was flying very badly. Injured? Burdened with a load or a captive? It was too far off, Dag thought, for him to pull yesterday’s risky trick with a precisely placed ground-rip, yet if it was taking a prisoner back to its malice, he’d have to try something. But as the creature pumped frantically upward, Dag saw that its back claws were empty.

  It lurched nearer. Had it seen him, was it attacking? One bent boot knife and a cut sapling weren’t going to be enough to bring it down. Dag took a breath, opened himself again, reached.

  Stood stunned. There was nothing in the mud-bat’s ground but bat, natural bat. Voiceless, wordless, stripped of reason. Terrified and confused to find itself in this all-wrong, too-heavy, dying body. Frantic to reach the cool refuge of its dimly remembered cave, far to the east, out of the horrible hurtful light. In the hot speed of its flight, with no support from its malice master, its disintegration was proceeding rapidly.

  There was no mistaking the ground of a mud-man that had lost its wits; Dag had seen the little tragedy played out countless times, most recently two days ago.

  Someone has dealt with the malice!

  A good half of the thousand pounds of worry weighing Dag’s heart lifted. His mouth opened, and his lips drew back in an uncontrollable grin.

  The mud-bat crashed again, rose again, and finally tumbled out of range over the ridgeline. Dag tottered back to their shelter. If he could have, he would have danced the distance.

  “Hey, hey, hey, Pakko!”

  “What is it?” Pakko clutched the only weapon he had, the water bottle.

  “No, good news! Your patrol must have found the malice’s lair! Its mud-men are skinned of their wits and scattering. If we just hold out, help has to come. My people might get up here by the end of the day. Yours could even be out looking for you already! They were what, you said, only about fifteen miles north of here when you parted ways? ”

  Pakko made a sound of profound relief. His head fell back limply.

  Despite everything, his lips, too, stretched in a grin.

  With a sense of joy, Dag flung his own ground open wide, releasing that cramped, deaf, blind, No one here and changing it for a flag of welcome, Here we are! Come get us! Pakko’s grin went wider. Even Owlet looked up and cooed, bemused by the sudden cheer of the mysterious, scary grown-ups.

  Dag escorted Owlet back to the streamlet for an overdue morning cleaning, then settled himself again and offered the child a celebratory half plunkin strip, which was grabbed with alacrity. Pakko accepted the other half. The child climbed back into his lap refuge, to gnaw and drool happily. “So, let me see.” Dag thought he might be babbling, but he didn’t care. Pakko was surely the most captive of audiences, and Owlet seemed to find the rumble of Dag’s voice soothing. “You asked for my life story.”

  “I sure do wonder how you stumbled onto me, I’ll say that,” Pakko allowed.

  “Well, I’m from Oleana, originally, but I took a walk around the lake . . .”

  ———

  Later, Dag passed some time tricking a few luckless squirrels and a mourning dove into becoming lunch, a process that both fascinated and fed the fretful Owlet. Peeled, cut up, and cooked on a toasting stick, the game produced hardly a mouthful, but Owlet’s was a little mouth.

  Dag was more worried for Pakko, who seemed barely able to swallow.

  It was midafternoon when Tavia arrived with Arkady, wonderfully sooner than Dag had dared hope. Unexpectedly, they also brought Calla, Indigo, and pack loads of supplies. Dag ducked out from under the ledge, where Owlet was napping, and hobbled forth to greet them.

  Arkady, still catching his breath from the climb, grabbed Dag by the shoulders as though he didn’t know whether to hug him or shake him. “I never thought I’d see you alive again! Ye gods, what horrible things have you been doing to your ground this time? ”

  “Did a little surgical ground-ripping on some mud-bats. That’s how we all ended up here and not as meat in the malice’s lair. Arkady, we’re saved! Someone’s done for the malice!”

  “Yes, we saw.” Tavia nodded vigorously. “There are dying mud-bats scattered all over the valley. We passed two on the way here.”

  “Where’s Fawn? And the others,” Dag added conscientiously.

  Arkady and Tavia looked at each other in a way Dag didn’t much like. Arkady said, “After you three were carried away, we made it to the trees, and the attack broke off. A mud-bat tried to take Barr, too, but it dropped him and shattered his leg. I put it back together as best I could, but there was no moving him far, so Sumac had me, Barr, and Rase hide up in a cave. Of sorts. Sumac decided she’d take everyone else west over the ridge, try to reach Laurel Gap.”

  Best patrol procedure, get the children and women out of range of the malice, spread the warning. Or, efficiently, both at once. “Good for her.” Was Fawn safe on her way to the Lakewalker camp, then?

  Evidently not, for Arkady added, “After that, Calla had better tell the tale.”

  The half-blood girl took a deep breath. “We were partway up the hill last night, trying to cross that saddle, when the mud-bats came back. The malice came with them. It was flying.”

  Dag’s belly chilled, but he reminded himself that however appalling this malice’s form, it was dead now.

  “It looked sort of like a mud-bat, only bigg
er and, and . . . more beautiful, I suppose. Once you’d seen it, you wouldn’t ever mistake it for anything else, not for a second.”

  Dag nodded understanding.

  “It took our minds. It was the strangest sensation. Like I was calm on top, but screaming underneath.” Her tremors were long gone, in this bright afternoon, but Dag sensed a bone-deep exhaustion left in their wake; a familiar state, after dealing with the terror of a malice.

  “It didn’t keep hold of her mind the way it did ours, though,” said Indigo. He, too, was pale with more than the night’s exertions.

  Calla scowled in memory. “It was like all these wild ideas kept fading in and out of my thoughts. Arkady thinks I was trying to veil myself.”

  “Anyway,” Indigo went on, “the mud-bats chased Sumac and Remo and Neeta off, and Fawn and Whit and Berry got away, too.” He seemed about to say more, but swallowed instead.

  “Together?” Dag asked in hope. Was Fawn safe with Sumac?

  Indigo shook his head. “They ran opposite ways. We think those walnut shields of yours must have worked.”

  “The malice marched the rest of us north up the Trace in the night,” Calla continued, “but I kept falling back. Dragging as much as I dared.”

  “I kept trying to make her keep up,” said Indigo. “It seemed like my own idea at the time. It was just . . . something we had to do. But we got farther and farther behind the others, and then . . . it was like my mind cleared. Then we turned tail and ran.”

  “I hoped we could find Arkady, and that the Lakewalkers would protect us,” said Calla. “I’ve never been so scared. We were searching along the ridge about where I thought Sumac had put him, when Neeta found us instead. She was all by herself. She said the patrollers had veiled themselves and shook off the mud-bats, and hid up in a cranny. Sumac was frantic by then, but finally decided someone still had to warn Laurel Gap Camp. So she took Remo and lit out westward, and left Neeta to hunt for Fawn and try to get her back to Arkady.”

  “But Neeta said she couldn’t,” said Indigo. “Find Fawn and Whit and Berry, that is. She said it was a good sign, because if her groundsense couldn’t find them, neither could the malice’s. She hoped they’d have the sense to stay hid.”

  Dag ran his hand through his hair, and tried not to scream. “Then what? ”

  “I came out of the cave to fetch water, and found Neeta and these two blundering around,” said Tavia. “I’d reached Arkady a couple of hours before.”

  “Tavia was our first word of your fate,” Arkady told Dag. “It was a relief to know the local patrol was on the hunt, but absent gods, what a mess.”

  Tavia went on, “We were trying to decide what was best to do for you, since we didn’t have near enough hands to carry an injured man down this ridge, or any better place to hide him if we did. And then we saw the first dying mud-bat, and then, well, the whole situation was changed.”

  “It was plain it was going to be easier to get the medicine maker to the injured than the other way around,” said Arkady. “Or so I thought, before I climbed this benighted mountain. I left Barr with Rase, which I don’t quite like, but they’ve no need to hide themselves now. They should be all right.”

  Tavia said eagerly, “Neeta recovered her horse, so she decided she’d ride north and try to find the others, wherever they’d gone after Calla and Indigo got away, and maybe make contact with the local patrollers, get us more help.”

  All as good and sensible as it could be, under the difficult circumstances, but where was Fawn? Plainly, no one here knew.

  Dag led the party around to their near-cave under the ledge. Arkady knelt down by Pakko, opening his ground to the man’s injury in that keen daunting way of his. “Interesting,” he murmured.

  Dag, familiar by now with that particular tone of voice, sincerely hoped his sprained ankle would qualify as boring. He made introductions, which he hoped the glazed-eyed Pakko understood, and went on, “I didn’t think it was good for the break to sit untreated this long, with his muscles in spasms around it like that, but while I’d have been willing to go in after the bone alignment, I wasn’t too sure of those disrupted nerve cords.”

  “Right on all counts,” said Arkady. He sat back on his heels and frowned at Dag. “You should be a patient right now, not an assistant, but need drives all. His skin is unbroken, bar some abrasion, and I’d like to keep it that way. That means we do it all by groundsetting techniques. I want you to do the heavy work, go in and carefully realign the two vertebrae, and place ground reinforcements across the fracture lines. Are you ready? ”

  Now? Dag’s relief having arrived, now he wanted to go search for his wife, blight it! And child. Yet Fawn wasn’t out there alone, he reminded himself. She’d had her kin with her . . . his thought snaked on, when last seen. Dag eyed the helpless, hurting Pakko, and controlled his frenzy of impatience. Fawn’s phrase, Soonest begun, soonest done, drifted through his head. “Just a moment.” Carefully, he sat on Pakko’s other side, laid his bad leg out, undid his arm harness, and set it aside.

  While Dag was pulling body, mind, and ground together, Arkady called, “Tavia, Calla, Indigo, set up camp here. We won’t be moving this patient tonight. It wants six fit fellows, and we’re going to need to fashion a rigid board carrier to tie him to, first.”

  Pakko swallowed, and said, “If I’m not going to walk again, sir”— he did not say aloud, but Dag understood, If I’m just going to be lying in a bedroll pissing myself—“I’d rather you found my knife.”

  Arkady gave him an enigmatic look. “You’ll have time to make that choice later. Ready, Dag? ”

  Arkady could scout the lay of his land and choose his tactics as swiftly as Dag, and for the same reason: forty years of experience. Despite his weariness, Dag found himself relaxing into that trusted leadership.

  He stretched his fingers, real and ghostly; sight and sound dropped away as he sank into the shared hinterland of flowing ground.

  It was not healing so much as making ready to heal. Pain moved with hot red violence. Muscles cried. The sculpted bones themselves were cool, solid, reassuring, yet like strange lace down and in, alive with blood both flowing and blocked, bruised and clotted. Arkady handled the much more delicate nerves, like ropes and whips and threads of fire, down and in, down and in . . .

  “Hold up,” Dag murmured, following with a ground-touch; Arkady gasped and broke out of his beginning ground lock. Dag couldn’t have fallen into a lock right now if all their lives had depended on it; his heart was too outwardly drawn, wild to regain the world and all it held. It made him a good anchor, he supposed. What Arkady was doing was complicated, a fiendishly difficult task accomplished with as much grace as any dance, and a strange sort of pleasure to observe just in its own right, apart from any consequences.

  “Thanks,” muttered Arkady. “Good job. You can pull out now . . .”

  Dag inhaled, blinked, sat up as their mountainside refuge rushed back into his senses. How much time had gone by? The sun seemed notably lower.

  “He passed out a while back,” reported Calla, wiping Pakko’s clammy face with a damp cloth.

  “I’m not surprised,” said Dag, and rolled away, pale and shaking.

  That was good! he thought with elation. Gods, he liked this work. Magery at full stretch. Allowable magery. He crawled to prop his shoulders up against the cool rock wall of the overhang, and let other people do everything else for a few minutes. Tavia brought him water, and a dried strip of ruddy New Moon plunkin.

  Surely this discharged his last obligation to fate; as he was Pakko’s good luck, perhaps someone else would be Fawn’s, passing the debt around. Now it was Dag’s turn to pursue his own ends. And no one had better get in his way.

  Just as soon as I can stand up.

  “Will Pakko walk again? ” asked Tavia diffidently.

  Dag shook his head. “Too early to say. It’ll be a week before the swelling goes down enough to tell the permanent damage. But he’ll live to see his wife aga
in.”

  When Arkady, at length, rolled back and propped his own shoulders, looking much like a wet rag, Dag said, “I need to go look for Fawn.”

  “Tomorrow,” said Arkady. “I promise we’ll get you down off this mountain first turn.”

  “I can get myself down.”

  Arkady made a rude noise. “How, fall? I grant you it would be quick.”

  Dag touched his left arm. “Something’s not right.”

  Arkady’s gaze flicked, quick and keen; he frowned, but did not argue that particular point. It disturbed Dag that he did not. “I suppose I can’t stop you, short of tying you up.”

  “That wouldn’t stop me, either.”

  “Absent gods, Dag, if you’ve half the sense of a plunkin, you’ll wait for help.”

  I am the help. Dag frowned.

  “And falling downhill or not, it would be dark by the time you could get to the wagons,” Arkady added. “I suppose that’s the one known meeting place, at this point. Otherwise you’ll have this whole valley to search.”

  “Mm,” said Dag trying to think it through. Everyone here was just as exhausted and short of sleep as he was. Calla was also missing a spouse. Dag would have quashed any half-crippled patroller of his who suggested a jaunt so plunkin-brained. Still . . . he touched his marriage cord again, rubbing it through the rips in his shirt, but it gave him no further enlightenment. Changed, yes, but what did that mean?

  Perhaps his and Fawn’s questionable cord weaving was simply running down naturally.